Photos, memorabilia, trolley tours evoke the birth of San Clemente

Where San Clemente’s Sit ‘n Sleep store now stands, once there was a restaurant known up and down California Highway 101 as the Sea Shore Café, famed for its chicken, seafood, steaks and jumbo shrimp.

Across the highway was San Clemente’s first building, erected in 1926 at the corner of El Camino Real and Avenida Del Mar, town founder Ole Hanson’s office.

Over time, the building reincarnated as, among other things, the Bank of San Clemente, a liquor store, a travel agency and Baskin-Robbins.

Hundreds who attended San Clemente Day – an event that the city hosted Saturday, Feb. 24 – thumbed through San Clemente Historical Society scrapbooks evoking simpler times.

The city was celebrating its 90th anniversary of incorporation, Feb. 28, 1928. The town is actually 93 years old, dating to 1925 when visionary developer Ole Hanson began grading and selling lots to create what he called “The Spanish Village.”

Guests at San Clemente Day learned that Hanson set up a tent on Dec. 6, 1925, on the then-barren site of today’s Hotel San Clemente. He offered a free chicken lunch to all comers who would hear his sales pitch. By day’s end, he had sold $125,000 worth of lots, and the San Clemente story had begun.

All around the town

San Clemente’s summer trolleys offered free Feb. 24 tours to view historic sites, like San Clemente’s first church – St. Clement’s Episcopal – and the Hanson family’s elegant 15-room home, now Casa Romantica Cultural Center and Gardens.

Guests at the Ole Hanson Beach Club, built by Hanson in 1927 as a municipal pool, viewed a home movie from the early days and exhibits courtesy of the historical society.

A May 6, 1927 picture page from El Heraldo de San Clemente included photos of the downtown business district, Ole Hanson on horseback and a Sunday School class being taught on the beach.

A picture of historic Mission San Juan Capistrano carried the caption, “Six miles north of San Clemente, it’s the favorite stop of many motorists on their way to San Clemente.”

Displays included a 1920s bathing suit, a poster-sized photo of 1950s-60s era Avenida Del Mar and Ole Hanson’s original tract map of a town he predicted would swell to 50,000.

San Clemente today has some 65,000 residents.

End of the Hanson era

The historical society proclaimed that between 1926 and 1946 more than 500 Spanish-motif homes and business sprinkled the landscape, but the Great Depression burst Ole Hanson’s bubble.

Well-to-do Los Angeles residents who had comprised most of the population of 1,000 walked away from their summer San Clemente homes. Foreclosures took over.

The city rescinded Hanson’s decree that all buildings must be Spanish so that cheaper architecture could spur continued building,

Still, the Depression introduced landmark buildings like the Casino San Clemente ballroom, which opened in 1937 to 5,000 dancers and Sterling Young’s Columbia Network Orchestra. The Casino hosted live radio broadcasts and celebrities like singer/actress Judy Garland. Admission was 40 cents.

In 1938, an adjacent landmark opened, the San Clemente Theater, later known as the Hidalgo Theater, eventually as the Miramar Theater.

Guests learned that San Clemente’s first mayor, Thomas Murphine, lost his posh blufftop home to a 1933 earthquake and then, in a political feud, barely survived Ole Hanson’s efforts to recall him from office.

The Nixon years

Horse stables built by Hanson’s financial partner Hamilton Cotton at the south end of town in 1929 would later become the J. J. Elmore Ranch, largest horse-breeding farm in California, the historical society reported.

Then in 1969, President Richard M. Nixon would purchase the Cotton estate and San Clemente would become known worldwide as Home of the Western White House.

A quote from newspaper satirist Art Hoppe described San Clemente during the 1969-80 Nixon years as “15,000 conservative Republicans, 2,000 surfers, five poor people, roughly the same number of liberal Democrats, and a guard at the gate to keep any more out.”

San Clemente Day photos showed the Hanson-era L.M. Bartow mansion on a bluff between the pier and T-Street Beach, then a 45-unit condominium that replaced it in the 1970s.

The Bartow home had been featured in Chamber of Commerce literature, the historical society wrote, but developers wanted to replace it with condominiums.

“Denied a permit to demolish the building in 1972, the property was bulldozed in the middle of the night,” the society wrote. “Enraged, members of the community came forward to found the San Clemente Historical Society.”

Site for a new museum?

On San Clemente  Day, society volunteers staffed a roomful of memorabilia they fetched from storage. The society’s collection has been housed in rented storage since a steep rent hike forced the society to close a 683-square-foot museum that had operated from 1999 to 2007 at the top of Avenida Del Mar.

The society asked San Clemente Day guests to help find donated space or low-cost space for a new museum.

“We could get by with 400 to 500 square feet,” said Larry Culbertson, society president. “Our only income is pictures, books and memberships. We need some help.” Call 949-492-9684.

Mayor Tim Brown declared San Clemente Day a success. “It’s had a really nice effect,” he said. “Everyone has their one thing that they love about this town. Everyone has their history. It’s all unifying. It’s a great day. Why not celebrate what we love about the town?”